Old Times, Not Necessarily Good Times

Thickets of George Orwell’s robust prose fill the stage in Ryan Kiggell’s adaptation of “Burmese Days,” which opened on Wednesday night at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival. But only rarely do these relatively purple passages transcend their literary origins, despite Mr. Kiggell’s efforts to hack through the verbiage of an author still finding his voice.

Orwell spent more than five years on “Burmese Days,” his first novel, which he began writing shortly after a stint on the Imperial Police Force in Burma, then part of the British empire and now known as Myanmar. The result was hardly a nostalgic look back. His depiction of that country’s venal, hypocritical colonists grappling with “the everlasting sense of being a liar” scared off British publishers for more than a year.

Like Maugham, Forster and other immediate forebears, Orwell offered Western European readers a beguiling look at the Other: John Flory (Jamie Zubairi), the conscience-stricken British merchant at the novel’s center, both laments and salutes the “foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscapes, foreign faces” that surround him in Burma. The fledgling London-based Aya Theater Company looks to convey this ambivalence by having all six cast members play the occupied and the occupiers.

But Mr. Kiggell, who also directed the piece and has taken on the smallest of the six parts, tends to tell while he’s showing. Waves of narration and exposition accompany even the most visually arresting sequences, and the dense text gets the better of several cast members now and then.

To those familiar with only Orwell’s later, more pared-down work, “Burmese Days” offers a diverting glimpse at what qualifies as a potboiler by Orwellian standards. If only Aya’s page-bound adaptation had given a stronger sense of it as a piece worthy of being seen as opposed to read out loud.